Don't get me wrong I am NOT against demos. I am simply trying to find a way to not go insane with everything I have to do When you start to count Steam, mobile, direct downloads, and multiply it for 20+ games...

Good news is that I found a way to still use my "Dropbox system" to upload new builds
I also put some games on itch.io to see how it works. It's nice but sadly not exactly what I wanted (I don't want another appstore but more integrated with my own site).

Anyways the bad news is that last month direct sales was the lowest since... 2010 or even before
It really seems that nowadays 99% of people buy the PC games on Steam only Add to this the various CDN costs and the master idiocy of Apple/MS that forces us devs to codesign the exe (and instead if run from a launcher like Steam, you don't need to do it!)... (the codesign tools have yearly cost as well and are an extra bother step to do).

I will wait until end of year but I fear it might no longer be worth it for me to keep selling the games directly. I'll see what happens in next months!

The reason I like buying your games directly is because I can't stand the censorship bullshit that comes with Steam. Plus, they're practically killing the indi developers. What about selling them on GOG.com?

Gog is curated, and they've made very clear that aren't interested in my games.
I think itch.io can be a good compromise since there's no censorship, you can either use the client to download patches, or download a single .zip with the latest build of the game (so like happens now when I do the betas for my games). I might end up using them (still doing some testing).

The reason I like buying your games directly is because I can't stand the censorship bullshit that comes with Steam. Plus, they're practically killing the indi developers. What about selling them on GOG.com?

That's not true at all about steam killing indie devs, Steam helps indie devs be heard, in the process of popularizing VNs in west getting them up on steam was the biggest step that made things change massively in terms of how much people know what VNs are. When they changed things from green-light to simply pay to get a game out they took indie devs into consideration and made a price as low as possible. Without steam most of those indie devs making VNs wouldn't even exist today.

And for censorship, for the most part it is just people making dragons out of flies.

Yes I wouldn't blame Steam for it. More the market saturation, like what's happening on other appstores. The "danger" is also not the various shitty games made in 5 minutes (sorry but that's what they are). But the SEVERAL GOOD GAMES that come out every week
As player, it must be great. As developer, not so much haha.

Regarding censorship now Steam is much more lenient - obviously you cannot post super-porn games, but things like Loren now could probably be published even without the need of a "censor workaround patch". I'm still probably going to do it though. Better safe than sorry